1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a high throughput, cost-effective, and low false-positive method of genetic screening, capable of performance over a wide range of metabolite groups, using electrospray tandem mass spectrometry. Efficient sample preparation and stringent quality controls are implemented as critical keys in maintaining consistency and accuracy in the resulting data for use in medical diagnosis.
2. Description of Prior Art
Mass spectrometry has been making significant contributions to the diagnosis of metabolic diseases for over 20 years. Fast Atom Bombardment Tandem Mass Spectrometry (FAB-MS/MS) analysis of acylcarnitines in very small volumes of whole blood or plasma has been previously made routine. See Millington, et al., Mass Spectrometry: Clinical and Biomedical Applications, 1, ch. 8, 299-318. It had been a very satisfactory biochemical method for the differential diagnosis of disorders of fatty acid catabolism, and the instrumental method recognized numerous defects of branched-chain amino acid catabolism. The frequency of occurrence of these diseases and their association with sudden, unexplained deaths has generated a great medical interest in the development of neonatal screening tests.
Routine analysis of amino acids and acylcannitines by Liquid Secondary Ion Tandem Mass Spectrometry (LSIMS/MS) from blood spots on filter paper has been demonstrated previously as well. See Chace et al., "Neonatal Screening for Inborn Errors of Metabolism by Automated Dynamic Liquid Sewary Ion Tandem Mass Spectrometry New Horizons in Neonatal Screening, 1994. To increase the number and rate at which samples can be analyzed, the development of automated sample preparation, instrumental analysis, and data interpretation was required. The increase in sample throughput and the ease of sample preparation allows for the more efficient and exacting diagnosis of a great number of metabolic disorders, a process necessary in determining the health of a newborn baby, or, for that matter, anyone in clinical care. The ranges of clinical symptoms and abnormalities in simple blood tests are so extreme that extensive biochemical investigation is warranted whenever metabolic disease is suspected, as noted in Millington, et al., "Diagnosis of Metabolic Disease," from Biological Mass Spectrometry: Present and Future, 3.15, 1994.
Metabolic profiling of amino acids and acylcarnitines from blood spots by use of automated electrospray tandem mass spectrometry (ESI-MS/MS), is a more powerfil diagnostic tool for inborn errors of metabolism. See Rashed, et al., Clinical Chem. 43:7, 1129-1141. New approaches to sample preparation and data interpretation have helped establish the methodology as a robust, high-throughput neonatal screening method. Compared with older methods, ESI-MS/MS is much more versatile and less labor intensive, because most of the steps can be automated.
Inborn errors of metabolism usually result from defective enzymes or cofactors. Medium-chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase (MCAD) deficiency is a very common disorder of fatty acid oxidation. As seen in Chace et al., Clin. Chem., 43:11, 2106-2113, MCAD deficiency is diagnosed on the basis of the increase of medium chain length acylcarnitines, as identifiable by isotope dilution mass spectrometry methods. Butyl esters of acylcarnitines share a similar fragmentation pattern with a common fragment ion at 85 Da after collision-induced dissociation using a mass spectrometer. The fragmentation pattern differences are compared to known spectra of healthy individuals and thereby can be diagnosed. In a clinical setting, analysis of acylcarnitines by tandem mass spectrometry is possible as their associated methyl esters allow the diagnostic recognition of all patients with MCAD deficiency, regardless of the underlying mutation, symptomatic state, or treatment Also, the analysis of amino acids as their associated butyl esters has been validated for newborn screening of phenylketonuria (PKU), tyrosinemia, maple syrup urine disease, and homocystinuria, all of which, among others, are detected by mass spectrometry.
The most selective and sensitive spectrometry, as it relates to genetic disorders, is performed by the automated, electrospray tandem mass spectrometer. The use of ESI-MS/MS has been presented to successfilly and quickly provide a specific and accurate screening method (Rashed, et al.). The method itself, however, must be complemented with an efficient sampling procedure and optimized injection and scan function mode to accommodate, with utmost accuracy, many samples at one time, thereby maximizing throughput while maintaining sensitivity and accuracy.
The efficiency ofthe ionization of the compounds is very high with the implementation of electrospray ionization. As seen in U.S. Pat. No. 5,352,891, Monning et al., the high ionization efficiency allows useful spectra required for even very small quantities of material. In other words, electrospray tandem mass spectrometry is very sensitive and specific in regards to its compound injection systems, thereby allowing a more broad spectrum of diseases to be covered, a lower false positive rate to be achieved, high specificity to be obtained, and shortened analytical time permitted. The use of the electrospray tandem MS/MS has been shown to increase throughput. Moreover, the technique has been successfully applied to prenatal diagnosis (Rashed, et al., 1130) and other screening processes. However, optimization of the method of screening newborns must be achieved by maximizing sample throughput in the most efficient and accurate way, beginning in the sample preparation, and culminating with the quality assurance. The overall process lends itself to parental peace-of-mind, and expedient and cost-effective results.
Sample preparation in support of the genetic screening of an individual for carnitines and .alpha.-amino acids (genetic markers for inborn errors in metabolism) for use in mass spectrometry is seen in the art. The standard method of collecting samples for neonatal screening is a heel prick followed by depositing the whole blood on special filter paper (or Guthrie cards) as a series of spots. See Millington, et al., International Journal of Mass Spectrometry and Ion Processes, 111,212,1991. The latest developed method of preparing the butyl ester derivatives of acylcarnitines and amino acids from the blood spots consists of processing samples in microplates. An automated blood-spot puncher punches a single blood spot from each Guthrie card directly into the individual wells of the microplate. To the blood spot punch in each well a methanolic solution containing known concentrations of stable isotope-labeled standards is added. The label standards might include glycine and alanine; valine, methionine, and phenylalanine; leucine and tyrosine; ornithine; carnitine; acetylcarnitine; propionylcarnitine; octanoylcarnitine; and palmitoylcarnitine, all in combination in some concentration as to enhance the sensitivity for particular compounds, as required by respective testing protocol. The samples are extracted and the extracts are then transferred to another microplate where the methanol is removed through evaporation. To the residue in each well, butanolic HCl or other chemical modifiers are added and the derivatization is completed by heating. Final residues are reconstituted and placed in an autosampler tray for introduction into the MS.
The incorporation of isotope-dilution techniques as standards provides quantitative information for specific components of each sample. There is the need for an optimal concentration of a combination of 12 amino acid standards and 8 acylcarnitinelcarnitine standards to improve accuracy and provide for quality control, as well as to provide for a number of scan functions that maximize metabolite information with high-throughput. Quality control and quality assurance in a clinical environment is of utmost importance because of the method and instrumentation that has evolved for the optimization of sample throughput. It is especially important as mass spectrometry results are correlated to the general populations of newborns so as to show accurate results in demographic trends.
The advantages of ESI-MS/MS over alternative methods of analysis are its high specificity and accuracy of quantification through use of the isotope-dilution technique, plus its speed and amenability to automation See Chace et al., Clin. Chem. Vol. 39, No. 1, 1993. Coupling the sensitivity in detection with the requirement that newborn screening requires rapid throughput, high accuracy, high precision, high selectivity, and a high value to low cost ratio, there is now a need in the clinical environment, now satisfied by the present invention, for an accurate means of assuring the quality of data for genetic disorder diagnosis is obtained in an organized and accurate manner. This quality can be coupled to the most efficient method of preparing and scanning samples, so as the number of false-positives and false-negatives are reduced, and sample throughput is necessarily maximized in the diagnostic clinical setting.